Rena Xu, MD, MBA, is a surgeon, researcher, and advisor to health care organizations. She is an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School and an attending urologic surgeon at Boston Children’s Hospital. Her first book, The Velocity of Care (MIT Press, Spring 2027), examines why the American health care system struggles to improve patients’ trajectories of care—their journeys from symptom to diagnosis to treatment to resolution—and how to change course.

Her writing has appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine, Health Affairs Forefront, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and The Yale Review, among other publications.

Previously, she was a management consultant at Boston Consulting Group. She holds an AB in biochemical sciences and government from Harvard College, an MD from Harvard Medical School, and an MBA from Harvard Business School, where she was a Blavatnik Fellow in Life Science Entrepreneurship. She completed urology residency at Massachusetts General Hospital and a pediatric urology fellowship at Boston Children’s Hospital.